Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday November 01, 2007 @08:53PM
from the term-papers-that-live-on dept.

openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."

And when the wikipedia admins come through and start wholesale editing or deleting articles, and then banning them when they try to defend their changes, they will also get a lesson in what happens when online communities start losing track of their core mission and are taken over by people with exaggerated egos and an axe to grind.

Oh, wait. This is slashdot. No one here has any idea what I'm talking about. Nevermind.:)

Obviously they weren't writing about Lockerbie Scotland (see Admin Slimvirgin aka the intelligence agent Linda Mack), or Circumcision (see admin Jayg). Or wrote something either of these admins felt was not notable, and deleted wholesale.

I'm tripping over myself to donate more money to WalesCultBomisOPedia!

I'm more curious as to how the professor will "grade" the editing and/or deletion of whatever their students submit. It would really suck of a student failed the assignment because he attracted the attention of a delete-friently admin.

I have a feeling a teacher who's on the ball enough to assign Wikipedia article writing to his students will understand the environment surrounding the wiki and will take such things into account. What will suck is when the copycats who don't actually understand Wikipedia will give the same assignment without the understanding of how wiki works behind the scenes.

What the good ones can do with Wikipedia is incredibly inspiring. A good friend of mine teaches High School in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn -- pretty much "the hood." He's a tall white anarchist with big hair. Try to imagine this classroom; it involves a lot of true stereotypes. But what does NOT fit the stereotype is that he started a class wiki, and has all his students contribute to it. Instead of a total mess, instead of abuse, graffiti and sludge, it's raised the level of ALL the students. It's a peer environment: once it becomes cool to do it right, to BE right, abuse and problems dry up almost completely.

This is an incredibly exciting new paradigm of teaching, because it puts the power of education directly into the students' hands. Education no longer needs to be a fount that springs forth from some "authority," it can be something that brings authority to the student. And the best part is the huge "fuck you" to the older generation of jaded "educators" (read: administrators), who would NEVER have tried such a thing, expecting only the worst. Instead it has completely revolutionized his classroom. Sure, there are kids with serious problems that aren't getting solved by a class wiki, and no one expects it to. But for the students at large, this is a BIG deal. And they LOVE it! Think of how many potential writers, poets, researchers, who knows, can be encouraged by just having a chance to write on a little webpage, developing the bravery to put it out there among their friends and enemies.

Guess what? Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them? Hell no - it's a condition of their employment that they produce a quantity of quality writing and original research. Or, to look at it another way, it's what academics do.

Such writing is often under time pressure - that doesn't mean it ends up being plagiarized, or a pack of lies, or 'just' journalism as you imply.

One reason this project works - one reason it's a good exercise to put students through - is that it forces them to synthesize their knowledge on a subject and practice writing in a vigorous, academic style, with the benefits of peer-review, but without the pressure of formal publication.

Guess what? Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.).

1. Academics are NOT dilitantes:- They already have the background knowledge- They already have the interest in their subject area (or they would not have gotten PhDs in their field)2. Academics should NOT be under pressure to do research and publish papers (as this leads to plagiarism and poor quality research as well)

I am very well aware of the controversy of "experts" and PhD's not citing the work of graduate students, not doing diligent research, being paid by corporations to do biased research, etc. Y

- Wikipedia does NOT require that contributors have background knowledge (and that's by design, if you want otherwise go to Citizendium),- the teacher is supervising their students' work, so I would expect the contributions from their students to be of better average value than the average wikipedia post.- anything that is not of encyclopedic value should be corrected by the community. That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work, not by dictating arbitrary rules about who should or shouldn't contribute based on someone's expectations about the quality of anybody else's work.

Wikipedia does NOT require that contributors have background knowledge

True, but irrelevant. The point is about what should be done. The point is that people should not write Wikipedia articles just for the sake of writing Wikipedia articles (or passing a course)

the teacher is supervising their students' work, so I would expect the contributions from their students to be of better average value than the average wikipedia post.

That depends on the quality of the teachers AND the students. I'd like to keep my expectations high when reading Wikipedia. Overall I am impressed by Wikipedia. I am not against students or anybody else writing Wikipedia articles. I am against writing WikiPedia articles merely as an exercise.

anything that is not of encyclopedic value should be corrected by the community. That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work, not by dictating arbitrary rules about who should or shouldn't contribute based on someone's expectations about the quality of anybody else's work.

Wikipedia does NOT require that contributors have background knowledge

True, but irrelevant. The point is about what should be done. The point is that people should not write Wikipedia articles just for the sake of writing Wikipedia articles (or passing a course)

the teacher is supervising their students' work, so I would expect the contributions from their students to be of better average value than the average wikipedia post.

That depends on the quality of the teachers AND the students. I'd like to keep my expectations high when reading Wikipedia. Overall I am impressed by Wikipedia. I am not against students or anybody else writing Wikipedia articles. I am against writing WikiPedia articles merely as an exercise.

anything that is not of encyclopedic value should be corrected by the community. That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work, not by dictating arbitrary rules about who should or shouldn't contribute based on someone's expectations about the quality of anybody else's work.

I agree with your last point.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your position. To me, your assertions that

The point is about what should be done. The point is that people should not write Wikipedia articles just for the sake of writing Wikipedia articles (or passing a course)

and

That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work, not by dictating arbitrary rules about who should or shouldn't contribute based on someone's expectations about the quality of anybody else's work.

I agree with your last point.

are direct contradictions. Do you or do you not support a criteria for limiting students contributing to Wikipedia as homework, based on your expectations of low quality?

I disagree. A significant amount of it will be good. Some of it will be bad, but probably not very much. If the prof is teaching the course this quarter, she'll probably be teaching it next year at the same time. If she doesn't cull / correct the bad articles, she can re-assign students to fix 'em. Great thing about Wikipedia -- once there's an article, it gets seen and edited by a handful, to dozens of people, depending on the subject matter. So even a crappy article can be made awesome. This is definately a good thing.

Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them?

It's an indication of *something* bad-- or at least "less than ideal". This intense focus on publishing, IMHO, distracts from teaching or even learning. That's right, learning. Even professors

I don't think this is all that relevant in this context, since we're talking about students. Since when do students write papers just because they want to? Chances are that a good number of students are only in the class because it's required.
(No problem with the rest of that.)

I'll come out of the closet here. I have assigned this to my students in advanced courses as well. But I always make it optional. Students have a choice: write up lecture notes for one lecture to share with their fellow students in class or find an article related to the course material in Wikipedia and improve it substantially.

My experience has been that those that do this have made very nice contributions for the community. I check up on it to make sure that it is not confused. Of course, I have only tried this in the relatively small classes that we have here at Berkeley.

The academic world is about the developing and sharing of knowledge with our fellow human beings. Wikipedia seems like one of the right ways to do this for well established results with immediate benefits and very little pain.

Yes, academia is about sharing with out fellow human beings, we do this through the process of peer review. However, wikipedia is not peer review. The relevant definition of 'peer' is: "a person who is equal to another in abilities, qualifications, age, background, and social status." [www.dictionary.com]

Whereas wikipedia is: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"

QED. I don't think you have to send this post off to two referees to figure that out.

Their peers are students - but their articles are being reviewed by a professor. So no, it's not peer review.You act like this one, perhaps slightly low quality article, is going to break Wikipedia. This is how articles start. Sometimes people who don't know much about the subject write the structure to better entice an expert to stay and fix it up. Eventually other people will read it, and get this, they can edit the page too. It doesn't have to be perfect at the start, it's an iterative process. Collabora

Yeah, I've noticed wikipedia is becoming more like that lately. Like, someone thinks it's their duty to go through every article and say "trivia sections are discouraged" or other nonsense little warnings that don't contribute anything to the article. All because it's some inside knowledge that they think they are so great they know all these "rules" about wikipedia and try to make you follow them.

Excellent sarcasm, but that's not what I'm referring to. I don't care about the little warnings and stuff, and I don't like vandalism any more than anyone else. In fact, there was one page that someone kept vandalizing that I tried very hard to get unvandalized. It worked, and hasn't been touched for a while now.I'm referring to the notability wars, and admins skirting around the whole peer review thing and making wholesale changes to articles, after when they ban if someone reverts them. That's a probl

Just because you could not express your disagreement with others in a manner that others view as respectful (and as a result likely got yourself banned from Wikipedia) doesn't mean that these students will too. When people act like trolls, push their POVs over everyone else, and refuse to even debate the issue with others without engaging in massive revert-wars, they generally get banned, and then they go post their whines here on Slashdot.

Even though there are cases in which other users and admins go too far, one has to learn that the most important skill of being a Wikipedian is to know when to stop arguing and calm the fuck down. Almost everyone who I see get banned for edit-warring is because they refuse to do this.

FR.TED: What does it do?DOUGAL: Squeeze it there. It's a joke telephone.FR.TED: Dougal. This is a dog toy.DOUGAL: What? No it's not Ted, it's a joke telephone.FR.TED: Dougal this is a toy for dogs. This is something people give dogs on their birthday.DOUGAL: Now seriously Ted, it's a joke telephone. You just give it to someone and tell them it's a phone and they'll try to make a call on it.FR.TED: Dougal, who would think this was a telephone? Even a dog knows this isn't a phone.DOUGAL: Eh..Ted... We'll agree to differ alright.FR.TED: No we won't agree to differ, because you're very very wrong. Look, does the picture on the on the packet not give you a clue. Why do you think the dog is so happy? He's happy because someone has given him a yellow rubber telephone that makes a noise.DOUGAL: No! No! He's laughing because some one's trying to make a call on the phone - and now look, I am banning you so I guess I win.. Its a joke telephone and thats all that will be said on the matter.

Depends. Was the assignment more flexible, asking students to add, say, 500 words to one or more existing articles? If so, did the teacher point out that there are many many articles [wikipedia.org] that need to be expanded, and admins are likely to leave you alone on those. (the decision to add or delete individual paragraphs is a non-admin one, unless the editors aren't able to work together and start an edit war [wikipedia.org]... in which case, admins should still be largely uninvolved other than protecting the page for a number of days to give the participants time to discuss the issue)

Even if the assignment was to create a completely new article, the teacher could have pointed them to the most wanted articles [wikipedia.org] list... any article created that has a ton of backlinks is less likely to be deleted just based on the number of backlinks, and is also more likely to be more obviously notable.

I was going to moderate your comment down, but instead, fine: I'll rise to the bait.
Frankly, your comment isn't very insightful, and it doesn't inspire much conversation. You're simply not as thought provoking as you apparently think that you are.
Maybe that's what behind your moderation, instead of some vast/. groupthink.
Even if your point has a shred of interesting commentary, you lose that behind aggressive and inflammatory language. There is a way to make a point without using insulting language. If anything, it's for the tone, and not the comment, for which you will be modded down.
Finally, if you don't like/., go start your own site. Start a blog, call it wiki-hater-blog, whatever. Then you can write whatever you like, and if people find you interesting they'll read your comments, drive ad revenue to you, leave comments, etc.
There. There's your conversation. Fun, huh?

That's not surprising. A good way of consolidating any learning (or at least confirming what you've learned), is to attempt to explain/pass-it-on to another individual. If they don't/can't understand what you're communicating, (or in the case of Wikipedia - if it get's edited to shreds), then chances are, you didn't know what you were talking about...

Articles tagged for speedy deletion aren't voted on in the Wikipedia. As long as you're not the person who created the article, you can dump the speedy deletion tag if you want, which prevents the speedy deletion from taking place. You're probably thinking of the AFD process, which gives the community a week to come up with a consensus. Technically, it's not a vote [wikipedia.org]; a proposed deletion that has 5 people opposed to the deletion with sound reasons and 10 people for the deletion with crappy or no reasons shoul

Articles that actually contribute to common knowledge, and might be read more than once by someone besides the author, rather than the typical "show you know how to assemble ideas in a paper that I will then proceed to return to you so you can deposit it in the recycling bin?
Thumbs up.

Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.

Of course, another activity could be for students to take a snapshot of an article, and proceed with research (web or otherwise) to review and validate all the claims/statements. It would be a good exercise in citing sources and tuning their bullshit/propaganda detectors.

So long as the multiple references don't all hark back to one primary source. There is a myriad of regurgitated "research" floating around the 'net. You probably could find ten "primary sources" on any topic which are really reworked reports of the same research results.

Take any topic, and do some real seaching on the web, and you'll soon get a deja-vu sense while reading though the "research papers".

My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it". I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.I would suggest teaching students how to find legitimate sources instead of using the brute-force method of blocking everything they don't understand.

I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.

The thing about that is that there are students who actually do try to cite Wikipedia articles as references, I've seen it plenty of times. It usually results in the instructor having to crack down on the practice. I do think though that blocking Wikipedia entirely is overkill, it should just be understood that it does not count as an official source. Wikipedia is a good place to start researching a topic, and I usually end up using one of the external references on a page as a "legitimate source."

As opposed to the rest of the internet which is chock-full of nothing but the highest quality, peer-reviewed content, written universally by the finest experts, hand selected from across the world?

Not everything on the internet is complete crap, it's just a matter of finding the right sources. When I do online research I tend towards.edu,.gov, and.org sites. And honestly, you can usually tell a good source from a bad one just from the way it is written.

As opposed to books? Last I checked, anybody can write a book, and the only thing required to get it bound and distributed is money. Either a publishers, or your own. It doesn't say much for the school when they either don't understand how books are published, or are encouraging the idea that "money makes right".

True, anybody can write a book, but books found in libraries tend to be vetted by librarians (although not experts in any particular subject, it is better than the randomness of the Internet). And Academic journals tend to be peer reviewed (again, not perfect, especially since "peers" often don't check all the references, much less try to duplicate any experiments, etc in a scientific journal, for example). Caveat emptor.

I think the situation is worse than you think. Just walk through any library, and you will find that there is plenty of junk in the non-fiction section of your local library. I believe there is a lot less 'vetting' by librarians than you think. I am no expert on that subject, and can only use what I have found on the shelves as evidence.

You should also keep in mind that it is a small subset of papers written that cite Academic journals. The vast majority of papers written use non-peered reviewed sour

Textbooks are citable; encyclopedias, whether wiki or dead-tree, are not. Any encyclopedia should be treated as a starting point for further research, not as an end. So if the guy at the desk next to you wrote the Wikipedia article you're reading, using it in your research is kind of like going up to the guy and asking him if he can help you figure out the subject and if he's found any good references. You wouldn't cite that kind of conversation either.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of slackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. If university students are WRITING Wikipedia articles as PART of their assignments, where the hell will they cut and paste from in order to finish by the deadline? And what online resource, pray tell, will the professor go to now to determine if a student has been cutting and pasting? Its like a frickin' hall of mirrors!

Sheez, hasn't this been going on for a while? When I was teaching in Japan almost two years ago, one of the other teachers in my district said he was having the students write up their towns in Wikipedia for a group project. You can still see some of their edits if you go to Oyabe, Toyama [wikipedia.org] and other pages. This isn't really news.

I agree. I took a Digital Journalism course under the Communication Department at Stanford two years ago with a Professor named Howard Rheingold. He assigned us a ton of these "pedagogical experiments" including both creating a Wiki article and making a legit contribution to an already existing page. It was some interesting fun, especially when we had to monitor afterwards whether or not our pages/edits actually survived the hordes of Wiki moderators.

Nicely put, but consider: the sum total of human achievement is increased in millions of ways every single day in ways which have never been reported on, because... it's not actually newsworthy. It's more like, completely expected.

A lack of human achievement would be newsworthy. Hmmm. Perhaps that's why politics gets so much coverage...

It will be interesting to monitor these articles if the students don't maintain them once the course has finished. Do they maintain their improved quality over time, or do they eventually get eroded by an army of badly informed editors? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to measure the "half life" of knowledge within Wikipedia? In the absence of a concerted maintenance effort by a dedicated individual does the quality of a typical article increase of does it decay to noise? Sadly my experience with some articles which I was once passionate about, but am less so now, suggests the latter.

1. Pop culture trash: this doesn't refer to all articles regarding popular culture, but rather just a great many. It usually starts out as(or is quickly whipped into shape by an experienced editor as) a small blurb summarizing the cultural relevance and origins of some item. Over time rampant speculation, positive description, and dubious links filter into it. These get these way because the people who care about and watch the article are not people interested in the academic information involved, but rather people who just like to see more of it. I've fixed up articles like this only to have them return to idiocy in a matter of 3-4 months when I checked up later. Examples ALMOST any article fitting description: "list of characters from {video game/tv show}"2. Seriously contentious items: These tend to be the best articles on wikipedia because every addition is scrutinized from 30 different perspectives, questionable items are well referenced because someone disagreeing will remove it otherwise, and things tend to be well scrutinized. Good examples: "evolution" and "god".3. relatively obscure item of actual academic interest: article usually started by someone with a casual interest. Rare(sometimes as rarely as every few months), but consistent, non-vandalized additions adding a sentence or two about the subject and the occasional restructuring of the whole article in accordance with what had been added. Usually one or two guardian users who care deeply about the subject and watch the article for extreme alterations. These kinds of articles improve slowly and never reach the point of incredible quality.

That's just my observation and theorizing on the subject. I could see all sorts of reasons people would disagree with my assessment.

The professor of my literary criticism class let us write a wikipedia page (or substantially add to an existing one) on a topic that interested us related to the course in lieu of taking a final. That "in lieu of" catch made him make us all swear not to tell anyone in the administration about the deed, so I guess it was more of a silent thing.I did mine on one of the essays in the Norton anthology on the reading list, Realism in the Balance [wikipedia.org]. I find it really cool that other people have edited the page, like

Personally, I too found writing for Wikipedia a very educational experience. The most important thing I learned was how to properly research and reference everything I wrote; I would make sure that I was never making any assumptions in what I wrote and that everything was as completely accurate, or at least true to my source material. If you start with a number of good books and scientific articles for reference material, you can produce really good articles. Never having studied in university, it's probably the closest I've ever come to doing scientific research. I found it to be a very satisfying experience and the lessons I learned will last me a lifetime.

The downside is when other people, who don't put nearly the same amount of effort into their research, come along and start adding information to the same article; almost always without any references. As opposed to simple vandalism that can easily be spotted by anyone, bad information degrades the overall quality of the article and is often difficult for other contributers to spot unless they are well versed in the subject matter. To maintain the quality of the articles you put so much work into, the only solution is to check on them constantly, often getting into protracted debates with determined individuals who really know very little. I find this quite depressing, but I see no immediate solutions. Citizendium, Veropedia? Maybe, but for now they're pretty obscure and it will be a long time before either have anywhere near the range of articles that Wikipedia does.

When I took Japanese History two years ago, we were given the assignment to pick a random topic related to Japanese history, research it, and write a Wikipedia article on the subject.This worked well for Japanese History because the English language Wikipedia didn't have too many articles at the time, and even the articles it did have were fragmentary and for the most part abandoned. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to do with more "mainstream" articles. You'd get more feedback from other Wikipedia users, sure, but you'd also be providing far less of the content.

I suspect that at least more than a couple of academics that are doing this. One instance that I know of is postings of an Intro to Neuroscience class taught by Steve Potter (a researcher in neuron controlled robots) at Georgia Tech's Biomedical Department. Each student in the class was instructed to pick one uncovered neuroscience topic and write an article on it. I don't know how far his assignments stretches back, but it has been done at least since last year.

...and the main compliant was that they were writing essays not articles (writing style was arguing a point of view, rather than stating the facts) and that they did not cite sources (or did not cite properly) i.e. they acted as new editors have always acted in Wikipedia. It was only noticed because they did it on mass from similarly named accounts and so were suspected as being one person... The Professor was contacted and apologised, and said he would prepare the students better next time by including g

This is not the first assignment of its type. There have been more than 40 such projects [wikipedia.org]; there are at least 10 more in progress. The students and the professors need to be aware of the "No original research [wikipedia.org]" policy. Many university-level assignments involve original research, and Wikipedia is not the right place for publishing original research.

Here are some of the articles created as a part of the assignments we're talking about:

An example in German would be doing a group assignment on Schiller [wikipedia.org], then have the group add to the article after the paper had been graded. There's lots of articles that are in need of extra info, and since the schools have books on various subjects as a given, they might as well use it in their education. I do follow that it might be more labor intensive, especially to begin with while the teacher has to learn how to work this into the curriculum and grading.

That brings up an interesting problem, though. Less motivated students are prone to ripping off large sections of text books. So would putting their work up on wikipedia end up being more damaging than helpful? (Of course, that assumes that WP is mostly free of plagiarism in the first place).

Actually, I like that idea of adding back to the article. Several of my teachers throughout school believed that the real proof that you've learned it is being able to do more than just rote memorization, such as write it or tell it in various ways, from different angles. Writing it down in wikipedia sounds excellent since you must remove bias when you type it out.

Off the top of my head, open source typically carries an ideology with it. It would be like a public school requiring students to do missionary for the Mormons - you're forcing people who may not agree to further your beliefs.

Ideology and religion are two separate things.

Public education rams a lot of ideology down its students' throats. That's not an accident -- it's by design. It takes whatever happens to be the majority viewpoint in a particular area, usually as determined by the local school board in conjunction with whatever's written in the textbooks, and impresses that on the students.

Now, generally, that's desirable. There are some ideologies that I think we can probably agree we want rammed down students throats; or, i

Number 2 is just plain silly. In Senior Design, for example, students are routinely given problems from industry, for the benefit of the company funding it. Why shouldn't open source be viable projects? The only issue is if the professor is actively involved in one - you can then argue conflict of interest.

My wife, a research librarian, attended a conference last week where Professor Groom presented on this topic.
What she found interesting were a couple of points:

The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.

The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.

Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.

She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.

She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.

She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.

Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.

Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.

Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.

Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?

So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia today:)

Just because it's different to grade doesn't mean it's hard.For example submitting a new article on wikipedia can result in 2 things:- minor edits (except for typos)- major editsChanges can be observed through the change log. In the former case the grader will have to grade the whole text, in the latter case a lot of the grading has been done for you. So yes, you exploit a community to perform partial grading for you.

>I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.

To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.

>I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to>prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them.Off topic. Read the article, or at least the summary. The students are from the University of Washington (a very good school btw). They are not high school students.

>I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think>logically is now common place.Why do you think that is?

In the US we have extremely poor k through 12 education, and then some very excellent colleges (in most other countries it is the reverse.) US high schools are paid for by *local* property taxes, so kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods get an excellent education, and most kids who grow up in middle or lower class neighborhoods get no education whatsoever until college. Many of my generation skip high school altogether and go directly into community college. The school districts provide for this in tacit acknowledgment of how worthless public high schools are.

Students are essentially expected to make up for 12 years of non education in 4 years of college. Most high schools, including the one I went to, are just jails to keep kids off the street until they turn 18.

BTW. Some, such as myself, come out of that and go on to do well in college and get a good job, only to end up paying social security to provide for the retirement of a generation which wasn't interested in providing for my generation's education. This seems fairly nonsensical to us, and so we are disinclined to continue this practice of "social security". What goes around comes around.

>Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that>English is/not/ the students first language. But, the problem is that it IS the students>first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years),>the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."

Languages evolve over time, and the previous generation always have the sense that the next generation is somehow speaking the language wrong. Your parents probably thought that there was something wrong in the way you talked as well. If you went to shakespeare's time, I'm sure people would think that you were some kind of idiot who couldn't speak properly.

The thing is, that english is *improving* not getting worse. Languages change in response to changing concepts, and the addition of new terminology. Modern english has extremely precise technical terminology embedded in it. Many things that were considered passive are now considered active, and so now are expressed as verbs instead of nouns. Many grammatical constructions have changed to allow for expressions that have become more common to be expressed more clearly and unambiguously. Many sophisticated systems for expressing common phrases in shorthand have developed so that ideas can be expressed more concisely.

You have to remember that no one ever *designed* the English language and that there *is no* authoritative English grammer or vocabulary because the English grammar and vocabularies are an *open set*.

The ability to construct language is genetically ingrained in all human beings, and if vocabulary or grammatical productions are ever missing or inadequate, we have the capacity to create them at will. If you leave some kids alone on an island and let them fend for themselves without teaching them any known human language, it has been demonstrated that they will generate their own complete language from the ground up in precisely 2 generations. This has been demonstrated many times. There is no real need for English language education for native speakers.

Goodness, sir or madam: you've apparently been reading Chomsky or his followers of linguistics. It's not really clear, from my casual glances at the literature and actually watching people, that language is genetically ingrained. The benefits of learning it and using it are very real, but there's no need for language itself to be ingrained, any more than reading is.

That was scary. A lot of my language has been picked up from indirect sources - movies, books, comics, etc. Not as much human contact per se, which would usually lead to a horrid pronounciation.

One thing to keep in mind is that, with rare exception, the local dialect of English is further from "true English" than what you see in the media. Take something as simple as describing a soft drink. Depending on location the terms soda, pop, soda pop, coke, or soda water could be used. In each case describing it as a "soft drink" will get the point across where a misplaced local name would prompt confusion, so that is what you see in national and international media.

just want to search random words and follow wiki links when you're bored.

Also referred to as wikidiving. My favourite method is picking two unrelated topics of interest and trying to get from one to the other via internal links, reading every article along the way. It as good a method as any for acquiring a well-rounded education.

Its worse than that. The contributions tend to be very biased and charged--which is part of the reason why you hear about these class projects from 'soft subjects'. e.g., women's studies programs have been doing this sort of thing for years. The result: substantial disinformation polluting the articles and an army of ideological enforcers to keep it there.

First of all, just because you haven't opted to continue writing on subjects you research does not mean that everyone does. For example, I have written a number of whitepapers — papers, if you will — since I graduated, and I don't work in academia. Many people write on subjects they care about in a less structured way — technical blogs are a good example of the phenomenon. You're being disingenuous if you think that just because you don't, no one does.Secondly, material written by the p

At the risk of pointing you to the work of a five year old, perhaps you should check out this Wikipedia article on the slippery slope [wikipedia.org] and why it can be a fallacy. Its use in conjunction with a straw man argument seems particularly relevant to your post.